Adorno: One Last Genius (2008)

Theodor W. Adorno THEODOR W. ADORNO One Last Genius DETLEV CLAUSSEN Translated by Rodney Livingstone The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2008 For my mother-in-law, Erna Leszczy§ska, and my mother, Carla Claussen, both of whom have helped me to understand the twentieth century through experience. Copyright © 2008 by Rodney Livingstone All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Originally published as Theodor W. Adorno: Ein letztes Genie, © S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, 2003. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Claussen, Detlev. [Theodor W. Adorno. English] Theodor W. Adorno : one last genius / Detlev Claussen ; translated by Rodney Livingstone. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-674-02618-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Adorno, Theodor W., 1903–1969. 2. Philosophers—Germany—Biography. 3. Philosophy, Modern—20th century. I. Title. B3199.A34C5813 2008 193—dc22 2007039108 Contents List of Illustrations vi How to Read This Book vii 1 Instead of an Overture: No Heirs 1 2 The House in Schöne Aussicht: A Frankfurt Childhood around 1910 13 3 From Teddie Wiesengrund to Dr. Wiesengrund-Adorno 65 4 Adorno as “Non-identical” Man 115 5 Transitions 145 Bertolt Brecht: “To Those Who Come after Us” 145 Theodor W. Adorno: “Out of the Firing-Line” 147 Hanns Eisler, the Non-identical Brother 149 Fritz Lang, the American Friend 162 6 Frankfurt Transfer 176 7 Adorno as “Identical” Man 220 8 The Palimpsest of Life 261 Appendix: Letters 341 Theodor W. Adorno to Ernst Bloch, 26 July 1962 341 Max Horkheimer to Theodor W. Adorno, 27 September 1958 343 Theodor W. Adorno to Max Horkheimer, 14 February 1965 354 Theodor W. Adorno to Claus Behncke, 21 February 1964 363 Max Horkheimer to Otto O. Herz, 1 September 1969 365 Notes 367 Sources 417 Acknowledgments 419 Index 427 Illustrations Following page 144 Schöne Aussicht, 1901 Adorno’s parents on their honeymoon Teddie as a child With Aunt Agathe and mother, Maria Dr. Wiesengrund-Adorno, latter half of the 1920s B. F. Dolbin, cartoon, 1931 In Los Angeles in the 1940s With Gretel Adorno, 1954 The reestablished Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt With Eduard Steuermann in Kranichstein, ca. 1960 At the piano, 1967 With Gretel in Sils Maria, 1964 Sils Maria, summer 1963 With Max Horkheimer and the Frankfurt SDS, 1967 With Hans-Jürgen Krahl, September 1968 In the institute occupied by the SDS, 1969 Revising a manuscript at Kettenhofweg 123 Lecture Hall VI in the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt Adorno in 1962 HowtoReadThisBook The aim of this book is to help Adorno’s texts speak for themselves and emerge in their original form from behind the secondary literature that has proliferated endlessly. Each chapter is designed so that it can also be read on its own. Adorno’s works are interpreted as a palimpsest, works full of overlapping ideas. References to all sources cited in the text can be found by those who wish to inspect them critically, or extend their reading, in the endnotes or at the end of the book under the heading “Sources.” Like most so-called child prodigies, I am a very late developer and I still feel today that whatever I truly exist for still lies before me. THEODOR W. ADORNO TO ERNST BLOCH, 26 JULY 1962 I feel very strongly that in my case work is a drug that helps me to overcome what would otherwise be an almost unbearable melancholy and loneliness. I fear that this is the secret of my so-called productivity. 31 MARCH 1960, NOTEBOOK F . and conceive the better state as one in which people could be different without fear. 1945 1. | Instead of an Overture: No Heirs The news of his death came suddenly and quite unexpectedly. People had just started to breathe freely again in Frankfurt after a turbulent summer semester. In mid-July 1969 Theodor Adorno and his wife, Gretel, had escaped from the usual sultry Frankfurt summer heat and, as he had done for the previous two decades, withdrawn to the Swiss mountains “like old mountain cattle changing their pasture.”1 Even at this distance he was able to deal with essential administrative matters and correspondence. On Wednesday, 6 August, a letter to Herbert Marcuse was being typed up in the office of the Institute for Social Research. The secretarial staff were waiting for alterations and a final approval from Zermatt. After a phone call to the Hotel Bristol, Adorno’s secretary in Frankfurt, Hertha Georg, was told that “Herr Professor” had “gone to the hospital.” It sounded to her as if this was nothing more than an excursion to the Magic Mountain. But toward noon, definitive word arrived in Frankfurt from Gretel Adorno. By Saturday a death notice signed by her appeared in the Frankfurter Rundschau, stating simply, “Theodor W. Adorno, born on 11 September 1903, died quietly in his sleep on 6 August 1969.” The German public was quite unprepared for the news of Adorno’s death in Switzerland. The obituaries lying in the file drawers of newspaper editors had not been updated. Most of the people who might have been entrusted with the task of writing a fresh one were on vacation. Unusually, no one rushed to the fore to make a public comment. The stormy political quarrels with his students that Adorno had endured in 1969 seemed ob- scure and had never been clarified. The public, which was not particularly well informed, appeared to expect disturbances during the funeral. Al- though it was the middle of the summer holiday season, almost two thou- sand mourners turned out for the funeral in the Frankfurt Central Ceme- tery. Famous faces could be seen following the coffin, accompanying Gretel Adorno. Not just Max Horkheimer, the man who had given a name to the Critical Theory that Adorno had made world-famous. Other old ac- quaintances were present, too: Ernst Bloch, aged but still very alert, and also Alfred Sohn-Rethel. Adorno had been exchanging ideas with them since the 1920s. The radical students, whom some people regarded as being • 1 responsible for Adorno’s early death, quietly mourned their teacher. Her- bert Marcuse was the first to find the right words: “There is no one who can represent Adorno and speak for him.”2 Adorno’s death left a vacuum. Something had disappeared irrevocably. But people were at a loss for words to describe this feeling. Was it because they were so close to this departed genius that they found themselves un- able to speak? Adorno himself had skewered the clichés of conventional biography in his writings. He had described the professional gravediggers of the “Culture Industry” so precisely that hardly any space remained for spontaneous statements. His older friend Horkheimer, who had neverthe- less outlived him, had no doubt in this moment of loss that the term “genius” was appropriate as a description of Adorno.3 Knowing as we do how close the two men were during their exile in America, it is inconceivable that he could have been unaware of Adorno’s reservations about the tradi- tional concept of genius: “If anything is to be salvaged of this concept it must be stripped away from its crude equation with the creative subject, who through vain exuberance bewitches the work of art into a document of its maker and thus diminishes it.”4 A history of Adorno’s life and work that simply ignores his cutting criticism of the biographies of geniuses can- not be written in good faith. One way of diminishing Adorno’s work, one that has only become popular since his death, has been to revere him as an artist while spurning him as a scholar. During his lifetime, his critics mostly took the opposite course: they represented him as a failed artist, leaving him to preside over theory in all its grayness. Readers who take a look at Adorno’s last great work, his Aesthetic The- ory—the work from which this quotation comes—will not need to search far before coming across the name of Goethe. Goethe’s name is intimately connected not only with the bourgeois concept of genius but also with the model of a successful life capable of being captured in a biography. For the generation that, like Adorno, was born in the long bourgeois century be- tween 1815 and 1914, Goethe stands at the beginning of this bourgeois ep- och, to which even someone born in 1903 could feel he belonged. By the end of this period, of course, Goethe’s works had long since been buried beneath the Goethe cult dedicated to the worship of the artistic genius. “This suits crude bourgeois consciousness as much because it implies a work ethic that glorifies pure human creativity regardless of its aim as because the viewer is relieved of taking any trouble with the object itself. 2 • instead of an overture The viewer is supposed to be satisfied with the personality of the artist— essentially a kitsch biography. Those who produce important works of art are not demigods but fallible, often neurotic and damaged, individuals.”5 Adorno’s fierce criticism of the bourgeois world and its religion of art does not end up as an ill-tempered rejection of a superannuated form of life. “The element of truth in the concept of genius is to be sought in the object, in what is open, not confined by repetition.”6 It is not only a Goethe who can be measured against the yardstick of such a concept of genius; Horkheimer’s reference to his deceased younger friend as a genius in “an age of transition” likewise appears entirely appropriate.7 Goethe recurs constantly in Horkheimer’s writings, too, as the epitome of the successful individual.

Load more